The Politics of Media Accountability in Africa
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The media have had a positive impact on democratization in Africa as conduits for political education, watchdogs of political accountability and forums for civic engagement. These developments notwithstanding, some critics characterize the media less sanguinely, highlighting attitudes that portray them as irresponsible, self-serving, unaccountable and a threat to the credibility and sustenance of the democratic process. In the context of the foregoing, this article evaluates various mechanisms of media accountability in Africa, and concludes that they are fraught with tensions among various political interests. It argues that state-controlled mechanisms of accountability are not always conducive to democracy, because they could be subject to abuse. There is, therefore, the need for the media themselves to put in place procedures and demonstrate attitudes and levels of performance that ensure the highest standards of professionalism and levels of probity and accountability.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it